As the communication and network technologies progress rapidly, the number of network-related facilities used in the home and small business is also increasing. The raising of the information appliances enables the popularity of easy-to-use, convenient, and Internet connectable appliances in the home and small business networks. In addition, the co-existence of different heterogeneous inter-connection technologies, such as IEEE 802.3, IEEE 802.11, Bluetooth, IEEE1394, power line, home plug, and so on, is becoming a common phenomenon.
In complicated and heterogeneous network environment, the management of the home and small business network is both a harsh challenge and an urgent demand for the users, appliance designers and service providers. In general, when the home or small business network encounter a problem, the user usually does not have sufficient knowledge or expertise to perform diagnosis or trouble-shooting. Therefore, this service provides a good business opportunity of potentially lucrative revenue for the telecommunication or Internet service companies.
As for the conventional network management protocols, the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is the most popular among the Internet Protocol Based (IP-BASED) local area network (LAN), while no obvious winner among other types of networks. However, SNMP is not a suitable protocol for remote home network diagnosis system because (1) the polling mechanism used by SNMP may cause network congestion in a large network or crossing the boundary of wide area network (WAN), and SNMP places the burden of data collection entirely on the management side, (2) SNMP agent cannot provide the historic record of an equipment or data, and (3) SNMP cannot use a unified data descriptor to preserve the flag, state and configuration of all the managed equipments.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,826,512 disclosed a method and apparatus for consumer electronic device diagnosis. The disclosed embodiments use the equipments in the home network, such as gateway and consumer electronic device, the test and diagnosis (T&D) process, such as collecting the error message and defining errors, and a remote equipment database for searching for related service correction routines to inform the user of the error and provide the solution.
Europe Patent EP1667359 disclosed a remote management method and related apparatus applicable to home network. The home network comprises a plurality of devices and a routing gateway. The routing gateway is coupled to each device of the plurality of devices. The remote management method comprises the step of using a Further Auto-Configuration Server (FACS) to request an Auto-Configuration Server (ACS) to access and configure the routing gateway in order to provide the FACS access to the routing gateway; and the ACS configuring the routing gateway in order to provide the FACS access to the routing gateway.
Taiwan Patent No. 1241509 disclosed an integrated network element management system and method, applicable to the placement of network elements in the network. The system includes a client computer and a master network element. The client computer includes a user interface for displaying the network topology, and a client application module for executing the network element placement. Each network element is represented by an icon in the network topology, and may be moved by dragging the icon. The master network element is connected to the client computer and at least a network element, and may communicate with one or more network elements through a topology discovery mechanism to obtain the network topology information. The master network element includes a topology information module for collecting and storing the network topology information and the configuration file of each network element. The disclosed patent defines the obtaining of the network element information, and establishing, storing and displaying the network topology.